


til the earth dies with the sun

by callunavulgari



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/F, F/M, Genderbending, Mythology - Freeform, Rough Sex, Season/Series 01, Sex Toys, Underage Sex, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-08
Updated: 2013-01-08
Packaged: 2017-11-24 03:41:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/629986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What are you doing to yourself, Derek?” — In which there is a retelling of season one, wolf pelts of selkie-esque origins, Derek fucking up, and Derek realizing that she can, in fact, forgive herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	til the earth dies with the sun

**Author's Note:**

> It's 1:08 AM where I am, so I'm posting this now since I'm not entirely sure what time I'm going to be off work tomorrow. So first off!
> 
> Daunting tags are mostly up there because I went into detail on Derek and Kate's relationship and they definitely were not a very healthy couple. 
> 
> More importantly, Faorism, you are a glorious, glorious person and the best beta a girl could ask for. Amoralambiguity, it was an absolute pleasure to write for your [beautiful piece of art](http://amoralambiguity.livejournal.com/163917.html). Combine genderswap with mythological wolf pelts and redemption fic and I am completely and totally happy. It's been a pleasure, hopefully everyone enjoys.

 

 

Derek remembers the forest. She remembers the dried leaves crunching beneath her paws—the taste of the winter air, cool and crisp against her tongue. If she closes her eyes, she can almost recall the feel of her family running along beside her—her father’s howls further ahead and her mother’s playful responses. She remembers Laura tackling her into a snow-drift, that familiar grin stretching her mouth wide.  
  
She remembers the sound of the wind whistling through the trees—the moon stroking her fur like some smiling goddess.  
  
(Derek remembers, but that’s the problem. All she has are her memories and try as she might, they aren’t going to stay with her forever.)  
  
.  
  
Their living room used to be painted a deep green, reminiscent of the evergreens that grew in the preserve.  
  
Derek is five when her mother drags her to the nearest Home Depot, grinning back at her when Derek grumbles under her breath—dragging her feet through the chandelier aisle—complaining about how she doesn’t want to go to the store. She wants to be home, curled in front of the fire and feeling the pages of Uncle Peter’s new book catch against the pads of her thumbs.  
  
“We’ll get ice cream after, sweetie,” her mother tells her, touching the tips of her fingers to the gleaming crystal of a nearby light fixture.  
  
Derek eyes her suspiciously, because that’s the voice her father uses when he’s trying to get her to do something too, but he almost never follows through. “Promise?”  
  
Her mother’s eyes sparkle. “Promise.”  
  
True to her word, they get ice cream afterward, talking quietly over a spread of color wheels, their treats melting slowly, making Derek’s hands sticky.  
  
“I like this one,” she says, pointing to one of the greens nearest to her mother’s elbow. It makes her think of her sugar pine tree—deep in the woods—the one that Laura had dared her to climb a few weeks ago. The broken arm had hurt, but it had healed quickly and Laura had gotten in trouble, so it was still her favorite.  
  
Her mother hums, licking the pink off her lips and smiling. “I do too,” she says, nodding. “For the living room?”  
  
“Mm-hmm.”  
  
The room is painted within the week.  
  
.  
  
(Now, the living room is black—charred wooden floors that crumble if she steps the wrong way and gray licking up the peeling walls.)  
  
.  
  
Derek’s seventh birthday is the first one to fall on the night of a full moon. Her father grins at her, draping her pelt over her shoulders and rubbing their cheeks together fondly, the feel of his stubble making her giggle.  
  
“Happy birthday, Derek,” he laughs, dropping a kiss to the top of her head.  
  
Despite still being early November, it’s unseasonably cold—gooseflesh creeping across her bare arms. Her pelt is warm though, so she closes her eyes and snuggles into it, feeling the change wash over her—bones shifting and rearranging.  When she opens them again her father’s eyes gleam red, the moon hanging low in the sky, heavy and bloated.  
  
That night, they run and run and run.  
  
It’s the best birthday she’s ever had.  
  
.  
  
The first time she gets her period, she almost cries, flinging herself into Laura’s room and locking it behind her. Laura looks up from her homework, eyebrow arched, and Derek hurries to explain.  
  
“I think I’m dying,” she cries, fidgeting nervously against the door. “The bleeding should have stopped by now, Laura, I don’t know what to do.”  
  
She gets as far as yanking her shorts down over her thighs before Laura heaves a huge sigh, shaking her head. “You aren’t dying, Derek. More importantly, why the hell hasn’t Mom given you this talk yet?”  
  
“Wh—?”  
  
Laura cuts her off, getting to her feet and unlocking the door to shout down the hall. “Mom! Derek thinks she’s dying and I’d really rather you get her a tampon before she gets blood all over my carpet!”  
  
She pats Derek on the head, smiling when laughter breaks out somewhere downstairs. “There ya go, sis. Now seriously, get out of here and let me finish my homework.”  
  
“I hate you,” Derek hisses as the door swings shut in her face.  
  
“No you don’t!” Laura shouts back.  
  
.  
  
Middle school sucks. Laura tells her that it’s normal to think that, that it sucks for everyone in the first year, but Derek doesn’t believe her. Most of her classmates are dumb as bricks and can’t seem to hold an intelligent conversation to save their lives. It’s a lonely place, so she spends most of her time studying, holing up in the library during lunch and in the morning before the bell rings.  
  
She takes the bus to the closest stop to her house and runs the mile and a half home, sometimes racing Laura, the both of them running so fast that the trees blur until they crash onto the front porch.  
  
Sixth grade is quiet and lonely, but she tries not to be sad for most of it, because she has a loving family and a stuck up eighth grader for a sister that she sometimes sees in the halls, so what does she have to be sad about? She’s a werewolf, which automatically makes her cooler than any of the other girls her age, who are just starting to discover their own boobs and perms and shaved legs, which are apparently better than unshaved.  
  
She’s a bit lacking in the chest department, so she hasn’t started to wear bras yet—her hair is a tangled mass of black curls spilling down her back—and she doesn’t like shaving her legs, so she leaves Laura’s razor alone in the shower. Her grades are fantastic, she’s the fastest swimmer on the swim team (even if Laura tells her that it’s cheating), and she spends summer nights running through the woods with her family and lazy sunny days playing baseball with her dad and the twins.  
  
She believes in honesty, so she doesn’t lie to herself. She never tells herself at night that it isn’t like she wanted friends anyway. She’s an eleven year old girl who is just starting to get made fun of for not wearing make-up and her best friend is her sister, of course she wants other friends. But she doesn’t have them, so she doesn’t let it get to her.  
  
.  
  
Derek’s family has spaghetti-night on Fridays. Her dad spends an hour meticulously crafting enough perfect meatballs to feed an army while Laura and Derek help their mom put the salad together—slicing green peppers and tomatoes and eggs, sprinkling cheese on top—and then they play cards until it’s time to start the noodles. During the summers, they have dinner on the back porch, with the setting sun beating down on their shoulders and the smell of grass and hot food all around them. In the winters they curl up in Derek’s sugar-pine living room in front of the fire. Sometimes they watch movies, but most of the time they just talk.  
  
After, they read to each other on the couch, curled together and trying to breathe in sync.  
  
.  
  
In eighth grade, she gets a crush on two people.  
  
The first is a quiet boy in her year named Devon. He sits two seats down from her in English class and spends most of the time buried in books. She’s curious about him, that’s all it is. He smells like old parchment and sandalwood, and she knows that his mother works at the wiccan shop just off of Main St. that always makes her sneeze when she walks past. She watches him in class sometimes and wonders if he likes the same type of books that she does, if maybe she should talk to him sometime.  
  
She doesn’t, not unless you count asking to borrow a pencil, and with time, the crush fades.  
  
The second is a transfer student who lasts approximately two weeks before her family moves away again. Her name had been Amy, and for those two weeks, she had gone jogging with Derek after school—she’d dragged her to the mall and helped her pick out clothes that Derek liked—not her mother, sister, or any of the girl’s at school. She had shown Derek how to braid her hair back by herself so it didn’t get quite so tangled. They’d gone to see a movie and thrown popcorn at each other until they got kicked out.  
  
Before she left town, she’d kissed Derek, her lips chapped and slightly cracked, but sweet.  
  
She’d pulled back with a sad smile, and that was that.  
  
.  
  
High school brings Kate Argent; hapless, _stupid_ first love; and the destruction of everything that Derek holds dear.  
  
.  
  
During Derek’s second week of sophomore year, they get a new swim coach called Kate Argent. She laughs a lot, but she’s stricter than their last one was—dark blonde hair pulled out of her face and a whistle hanging around her neck. She makes them do drills, pushing their limits until even Derek aches a bit—her muscles struggling to heal the places where she’s pulled them.  
  
By the time the coach has called it quits, her teammates are all but dead in the water, groaning as they head back to the ladder.  
  
When she finally hauls herself out of the water, the muscles in her arms stretched tight and sore, the coach is watching her unblinkingly, her heart beating much faster than it should be. She smiles when she sees that Derek’s noticed her watching, a quick flash of white teeth that makes something inside Derek want to go belly-up and whimpering.  
  
She gives Derek a quick once over, up and down—lingering at her hips, the very faint curve of her breasts, and her lips.  
  
Kate smirks when Derek flushes, and very slowly, licks her lips.  
  
Derek shivers.  
  
.  
  
Coach “please call me Kate” Argent is the most exhausting, but most capable coach that Derek has ever had. The first week, three people quit the team.  
  
“Pulling out the weeds is the first thing you need to do,” she tells them later that day, nodding at each of them. “Congratulations, the rest of you might one day blossom into pretty little roses.”  
  
She then makes them all beat their record times before they’re allowed to go home.  
  
.  
  
Derek starts getting lessons after everyone else goes home because Kate “wants to help her realize her full potential.”  
  
These lessons are just as grueling, if not more so, because Kate strips down to her own suit and runs laps with her. Even as a human, Kate manages to keep pace with her, and by the time they climb out of the pool they’re leaning on each other, the feel of Kate’s fingers hot against her waist.  
  
After the very first lesson, Kate had stared at Derek, her own chest heaving. When she finally caught her breath, she had grinned, leaning forward to poke Derek in the shoulder. “You’re too tense,” she’d purred, sliding her hands onto Derek’s shoulders and _kneading_.  
  
Derek had gone home with her legs like jelly, shaky, the memory of Kate’s hands on her skin fresh in her mind.  
  
.  
  
The first time they have sex is the week that Derek turns sixteen.  
  
Kate’s particularly hard on them that day, so by the time the rest of the team goes home, Derek’s dreading her secondary lessons. Werewolf stamina or not, she’s exhausted, muscles sore and burning, and she’s not entirely sure if she can handle Kate’s house of pain for a second time.  
  
Kate surprises her though. They swim lazy laps back and forth until Derek stops aching—shoving each other as Kate tells her college horror stories.  
  
She’s not as surprised as she should be when Kate backs her into the shadowed corner of the pool near the diving board, her body pressed tight against Derek’s. Heat unfurls in her gut as Kate bends down to press a kiss to her jaw, saying quietly, “If you don’t want this, tell me now, and I’ll back off, I swear.”  
  
Part of her feels like she’s coming apart, like the moon’s peaking over the horizon and her pelt is half-on, half-off her shoulders. She won’t know it, but her eyes flare blue in that moment, causing Kate’s smile to twist into something hungrier.  
  
She shivers, her legs wrapping around Kate’s waist and a quiet growl making its way past her lips. “I want you,” she whispers. “God, I want you.”  
  
Kate smiles against her lips, slipping a hand between them to press between Derek’s legs.  
  
“Not here though,” she breathes between kisses, and Derek groans.  
  
Kate laughs. “I mean not in the pool, Derek,” she says, still laughing when Derek reluctantly pulls away from her.  
  
“Then where?” Derek asks, breath catching in the back of her throat when Kate slides her knee between her thighs, pressing her back until her back’s grinding into the wall, the friction delightful.  
  
Kate smirks, droplets of water in her eyelashes and her cheeks flushed. “Locker room will do,” she finally says, laughing again when Derek takes her by the hips and heaves her out of the water.  
  
They make it to the bathroom before the suits come off, but barely. Kate’s body is all soft, gentle angles beneath the suit, and it’s wonderful to finally be able to press kisses to the flesh that’s been revealed—sucking a dusky nipple into her mouth and clenching her thighs at the noise Kate makes when she does so.  
  
Derek whines when Kate strokes a hand down her belly, choking off into a moan when Kate tweaks her clit once before abruptly sliding a finger into her. Kate hums deep in her throat, pressing kisses to her lips as Derek shakes apart in her arms. “You’re so wet, Derek,” she purrs thoughtfully, eyes half-lidded and cloudy with pleasure.  
  
There’s a sound building in Derek’s throat that’s somewhere between a whimper and a whine, like the noise omegas make when they stumble into Hale territory and come across her father. Kate laughs, hooking another finger inside her. “I want to taste you. May I?” she asks, already going to her knees.  
  
By the time she licks her way inside, Derek’s already gone, her hips twitching forward and her mouth open and wet.  
  
.  
  
When she gets home that night, Laura wrinkles her nose and shoos her upstairs before she has a chance to say a word.  
  
Laura shoves her into the bathroom, making her sit down on the toilet seat as she starts the shower, her long dark hair falling over her shoulder soon dusted with water droplets. “What were you thinking?” she hisses, yanking Derek’s shirt up and over her head. She glares at Derek before rolling her eyes at whatever she finds on Derek’s face. “Oh, who am I kidding. You clearly weren’t thinking. Coming in here smelling like sex? Are you stupid? Shower before you get home, dumbass!”  
  
Laura’s still cursing when she manages to shove Derek into the shower, taking her spot on the toilet seat as Derek tentatively reaches for the shampoo. After a moment’s ominous silence, Laura finally takes a deep breath. “So, who's the lucky girl?” she finally asks, making Derek go stiff in the shower.  
  
“Who said it was a girl?” she asks defensively, rubbing the shampoo into her hair vigorously.  
  
Laura snorts. “Please, Derek. I’m not stupid. You don’t smell like spunk or boy. You smell like pussy and chlorine, so I’m going to make a guess that it’s either a teammate or your coach.”  
  
She apparently takes Derek’s silence to mean yes, because she laughs meanly. “And little sister, if I can tell that much? You can be damn sure that mom and dad will know more. So seriously, take it from me, shower before you come home unless you want to have a very embarrassing talk.”  
  
The water feels fantastic against her scalp as she rinses the suds out of her hair, soothing her chlorine-stiffened hair into something more manageable. “Is that why you smelled like school-bought soap all last year?” she teases, finally letting the tension go out of her shoulders.  
  
Laura huffs. “Oh shut up. I’m gonna go downstairs now. Make sure you stay in here for another few minutes to get the smell completely off.”  
  
Derek’s laughter follows her out the door.  
  
.  
  
So things go.  
  
She keeps up with her “lessons” with Kate, even if those lessons are now just an excuse to have sex. Eventually, Kate takes Derek home with her, and they have messy sex on Kate’s futon for hours because Laura’s covering for her, telling their parents that Derek is at a friends house.  
  
“Just be careful,” she’d whispered. “All those student-teacher relationships usually go bad, so just... keep an eye out.”  
  
The first time Kate fucks her, it’s with a purple dildo that’s a little bit too big for Derek. Even with copious quantities of lube it hurts going in, the fat head sliding into her excruciatingly slow, like it’s splitting her open as Kate thrusts in until the metal of the harness is pressed up against Derek’s ass.  
  
“That hurt, sweetie?” Kate coos, her voice saccharine and sweet, but shaky as she pulls out, the thick length of it dragging painfully backwards before Kate thrusts back in, making Derek grunt and bump her head against the headboard.  
  
“A little,” Derek breathes. When Kate pauses, the tip barely inside of her, Derek huffs out an annoyed little whine and hisses, “That didn’t mean stop!”  
  
It’s not a great experience at first—it hurts even after Kate pulls out to get more lube, but Kate seems to like it, her breath quickening as she fucks Derek harder into the mattress, making all kinds of noises until the pain fades.  
  
In her head, Derek will always chalk that time up to a failure. She hadn’t gotten off, and even if it stopped hurting quite so much, it hadn’t been enough for it to feel _good_. But Kate had come, over and over again while Derek whimpered, the thing chafing as Kate fucked her too hard for too long.  
  
The next time is better of course, and the time after _that_ is even better.  
  
It still hurts most of the time, because Kate likes to buy even bigger dildos when she thinks that Derek’s acclimated to the ones she has. She buys hulking monstrosities in all different colors and shapes, her breath going choppy when Derek whimpers at the pain when she first slides in.  
  
It hurts, but it’s a good kind of hurt, the kind that makes Derek wet enough that when Kate tells her to go to her knees and suck it, she does, and afterwards, when the only thing that’s helping it slide into her is saliva and her own wetness, well, that pain is good too.  
  
Kate likes it, anyway, so of course it’s good.  
  
.  
  
“Derek, honey, we’re kind of worried about you,” her mother tells her after the fourth time she misses spaghetti night, coming home fresh from a shower, but still smelling faintly of silicone and pussy.  
  
Her father nods, and Derek looks around the empty dining room, the vacated chairs where her aunts and uncles and cousins sit—where her pack sits—and feels something ache inside of her.  
  
She only realizes what it is when she shrugs and heads upstairs, that strange ache like a hole in her chest.  
  
She can’t feel them. Kate’s washed them all away until it’s just her where pack should be.  
  
Derek’s breath goes uneven, her cheeks wet, and her chest heaving—curling up into a corner of her room and hyperventilating until Laura tiptoes into her room and slides her pelt over her shoulders. The change is instant, painless, and Derek can smell the pines and her father’s pipe tobacco and the smell of Laura’s perfume. For a moment, it’s overwhelming—too much too soon, and the part of her that is the wolf wants to tear at her own skin for trying to replace what’s irreplaceable.  
  
She doesn’t know how long she stays like that, wrapped in Laura’s arms, the feel of her fur like a breath of fresh air, but eventually she pulls away, shrugging the pelt from her shoulders in a gesture that’s as familiar as breathing.  
  
She feels the fur fade from her skin, her bones crunching back into familiar human shapes, and when she can open her eyes again, Laura’s looking at her, her own eyes wet.  
  
“You love her, don’t you?” she asks quietly. “You love her so much that she almost replaced us.”  
  
Derek chokes on a sob, and that’s enough of an answer for Laura because she sighs. “Little sister, you’ll have to tell her. If you mean it. About all of us.”  
  
She still can’t speak, so she doesn’t. But she knows.  
  
.  
  
She steals her pelt the next night, carefully folding it into a backpack and heading to Kate’s apartment.  
  
Kate answers the door with a smile, already reaching out to tug her inside. She kisses Derek breathless, pinning her back against the closed door and reaching—  
  
It’s too fast, too fast, too fast—  
  
Derek breathes shakily when Kate pushes her towards the bedroom. For the first time, she wishes that they could be like normal couples, that they could walk around town without Kate losing her job—that they could get ice cream or Derek could take Kate to meet her parents. But that’s what she’s working towards, right now.  
  
Right no—  
  
Kate kisses her again, pushing her down onto the bed and licking between her legs, already reaching for the dildo and it’s harness. Derek breathes in shakily, letting her backpack drop to the ground and bringing her hands down so she can thread her fingers through Kate’s hair.  
  
After a moment, Kate groans, shakily pulling back to secure the harness around her hips. It hasn’t been long enough. Derek isn’t wet enough to take it dry, but Kate sits back, an eyebrow raised, until Derek swallows nervously and climbs into her lap, hissing in pain as she slides down one painstaking inch at a time. Kate’s pulse stutters, and a thrum of pleasure curls up Derek’s spine as Kate grabs a hold of Derek’s shoulder and pushes her the rest of the way down, too fast, and it hurts, but—  
  
Kate shakes with her first orgasm when Derek keens in pain, so it must be good.  
  
She’ll tell her later.  
  
.  
  
Kate takes the news surprisingly well.  
  
When Derek hands her pelt to Kate, her hands shaking, the other woman smiles, a flash of white teeth in the dark.  
  
She kisses Derek, and says, “Thank you for trusting me with this.”  
  
.  
  
Derek goes home and kisses her mother on the cheek for the first time in weeks, curling up with the twins on the sofa to watch the latest Disney movie, and starts up a conversation with her father about politics.  
  
Her parents exchange relieved looks from across the room and Derek pretends she doesn’t notice.  
  
When Laura gets home from work and sees Derek sitting there, a certain tension goes out of her frame, and she offers Derek a tentative, but pleased smile.  
  
She’ll tell them about Kate tomorrow.  
  
.  
  
She never gets the chance.  
  
.  
  
First period starts at 7:05am. Chemistry. It’s in the building at the very back of the school, the really old one where the fire alarms are all still from the seventies. She yawns, and tries not to slump forward into any of the equipment, wondering who in their right mind thought it would be a good idea to make students mix corrosive acids so early in the morning.  
  
At 7:14am, she starts screaming, and no one can quiet her until Laura shoves her way into the room, face white, eyes flickering red. She keeps her head down, mumbling some excuse to the teacher with a kind of numb calm and fights to drag Derek into the hallway.  
  
They wait there until a teacher comes for them.  
  
.  
  
The house is a charred monstrosity by the time they get there, smoke and ash still thick in the air. But beneath all that, she can smell something slightly sweeter, like roasting mea—  
  
She’s retching into the grass before she can stop it.  
  
The sheriff gives her a blanket, wraps her and Laura up in it and tells them to go sit in the squad car. That they really shouldn’t be here.  
  
The glare that Laura shoots him is withering. “We have nowhere else to go,” she hisses, which isn’t all that fair. He’s only being nice.  
  
.  
  
They find eight bodies in the basement and a dead-eyed Peter wandering the woods, half his face burned away.  
  
They say it was probably a gas leak, but they don’t seem very sure.  
  
Laura’s eyes are like stone as she watches the remains being dragged from the wreckage, refusing to be moved.  
  
.  
  
Three days later, she goes to find Kate. Surely she’ll have heard by now. There’s no way that she doesn’t know, she probably hasn’t come because she’s scared of people finding out about them. Otherwise, she would be with her.  
  
When she gets to the apartment, it’s been cleaned out, save for one note.  
  
Derek howls with anger, shredding the walls and the carpet that still smells like sex, busting out the windows. She doesn’t stop until she hears the distant call of a police siren. Only then does she leave, the anger burned out of her.  
  
.  
  
“It isn’t your fault,” Laura tells her, but her voice is dead, her eyes blank. Derek sobs into her sister’s shoulder and though Laura runs her fingers through Derek’s hair, it feels monotonous, like she’s going through the motions but can’t feel anything.  
  
Maybe that’s a good thing. Laura’s her alpha now. Maybe if Laura felt anything, she’d rip Derek apart.  
  
.  
  
They stay at the hospital until the inheritance passes to Laura on her birthday.  
  
Then they get in the car Laura had gotten for her birthday last year and they drive.  
  
And drive and drive and drive—  
  
.  
  
Laura still has her pelt—they had found it in the attic, smelling of smoke and ash, but intact—so the first moon isn’t as terrible as it could be. Laura changes, her eyes red as embers, and even as a wolf she stares blankly, whining every once in awhile.  
  
Derek... has no idea what happened to her pelt. She doesn’t know if Kate had thrown it into the fire with the rest of her family or not, but she thinks that must have been the case. It had to have been the case.  
  
So Derek stays mostly human that first moon, hair creeping down her jawline, eyes like blue ice, and fangs distorting the shape of her jaw in a way that almost hurts. She wonders if this is what it feels like to be a turned wolf—to be a wolf without a pelt, without a pack—and if so, she’s glad that she’d been born into it.  
  
She watches Laura pace, her dead eyes hazy, and settles in as close to Laura as she dares, belly up like a good beta.  
  
It takes hours, but eventually Laura settles down with her, curling up around Derek and burying her snout in Derek’s hair.  
  
.  
  
They move around a lot, stay in a lot of skeezy hotels. Technically neither of them needs to work with the money that they’ve been left, but they both do. Laura gets a job at a local Starbucks in Michigan, then at a P.F. Chang’s in Ohio. Derek broadens her horizons while working at a library, and learns how to fix cars, mostly through trial and error and a lot of shouting from Laura whenever she renders the Mustang useless until she figures out how to fix it.  
  
She gets a job at an auto shop in Tennessee, one that pays under the table and doesn’t care that she’s not certified. They just see her tits and hire her immediately, because apparently hot chick mechanic is what gets Tennessee boys hot and bothered. She doesn’t care. She learns as she goes, and eventually gets a certificate.  
  
It isn’t her favorite job, but it does what it’s supposed to—distracting her enough that she can’t think.  
  
.  
  
Laura snaps out of it on the anniversary of their family’s death. It isn’t too noticeable, but there’s emotion back in her eyes, a scowl or a quirk of the lips here or there.  
  
The first thing she does is apologize, rubbing their cheeks together and pulling Derek in for a tight hug. When she pulls back, her eyes are red—blurred with tears. “I meant it, you know,” she says later, pulling her hair up into a bun as she gets ready for work. “When I said that it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t, Derek, it was hers. There’s no use blaming yourself.”  
  
Derek will always blame herself. She has her penance—the destruction of her pelt ensuring that she’ll never again truly remember what it felt like to run with her pack. There’s a big gaping hole beneath her rib cage, and she’ll never again be able to fill it.  
  
But Laura doesn’t have to know that, so she smiles hesitantly, and ties Laura’s apron for her.  
  
.  
  
They settle in New York and stay for seven years in a somewhat decent apartment on the bad side of town.  
  
Derek doesn’t like it.  
  
She misses the trees and the wind and the smell of air that isn’t polluted with hundreds of chemicals. The full moons feel fake, the walls too much like cages, so they sleep through them, huddled together like a couple of children.  
  
.  
  
Derek meets someone at work, some guy who seems nice enough and wants to fuck her.  
  
So she lets him. Growling with frustration when he coos sweet-nothings in her ear and treats her like glass. He’s too gentle, stroking her breasts with his grease stained fingers and licking her open until it’s not even a fight for him to slide right in, a smooth glide that’s effortless and doesn’t hurt at all.  
  
He smells like oil and sweat and very vaguely of cigarettes—not at all like chlorine.  
  
She hates it.  
  
.  
  
They watch the ball drop in Times Square for the first time, bringing in 2011 with a bang that frankly hurts her ears a little bit too much.  
  
They’re still ringing the next day, but it’s worth it to see Laura smile tentatively at her, reaching out to hook their fingers together. “New year,” she shouts at Derek over the noise, pressing a kiss to her cheek. “New beginnings!”  
  
.  
  
They have three months of happiness. They haven’t forgotten anyone—they still mourn, but they’re trying. Trying to get over the anger and the hurt long enough to live their lives properly.  
  
For the most part, they succeed.  
  
They have three months of happiness before news of a spiral being found on wildlife in Beacon Hills sends Laura packing.  
  
“I’ll be back in a week, Derek,” Laura assures her. “I just need to do this. I need to find out. I’ll call every day, just be careful, okay?”  
  
Laura presses a kiss to the top of her head and Derek holds her so tightly that had she been human, one of her ribs would have snapped.  
  
.  
  
She isn’t back within a week.  
  
Derek hotwires a car, drives cross-country at reckless speeds without sleeping, and when she gets into Beacon Hills, she trips over her sister’s body.  
  
Half of it anyway.  
  
There’s an inhaler a few feet away from her sister, and even though it smells like metal and teenage boy, she pockets it. There will be enough time to worry about it when she doesn’t have to bury her sister before the police find her.  
  
Whoever killed Laura has stolen her family’s eyes, a new alpha who isn’t like them. An alpha who would kill for the title.  
  
Her family had always been peaceful. What hunters they knew of didn’t bother them, so their parents never bothered educating them beyond the bogeytales of wayward hunters who didn’t follow the code. Maybe they shouldn’t have been so peaceful. Maybe then they would have been prepared—maybe Derek would have been prepared for Kate, who bore the name Argent proudly.  
  
Maybe she would have known.  
  
But she didn’t, and now her family’s dead, all of them.  
  
.  
  
She buries Laura outside of their old house with her pelt, draping it gently over her shoulders and watching her sister change one last time. Her wolf is just as familiar as Laura is as a human, and her dead eyes are the same.  
  
The wolfsbane stings her hands as she painstakingly lays it in place, but she’s beyond caring.  
  
When she’s done, she heads into the husk of a house and falls asleep to the sound of the ghosts in her head.

.

She wakes up to the sound of muffled voices, real human voices coming from outside—not the ghosts in her head. It smells like teenage boy and something else, something that has her growling under her breath, hackles rising because something smells like alpha, it smells like red and sickness and something that _is not Laura_.  
  
She’s outside before she knows what she’s doing, Laura’s old leather jacket hastily thrown over her shoulders, her long hair still tangled down her back. She’ll have to cut it soon. Kate had always loved her hair—she’d stroked her fingers through it after they’d been together, cooing about how lovely it was—thick and dark, heavy as a curtain.  
  
After, Laura had cut it short for her, hacked it off to her ears. It was better that way. She didn’t have the ghost of Kate hanging around her, purring sweet-nothings into her ears, the memory of fingers against her scalp driving her mad.  
  
Now Laura isn’t around for their bi-monthly haircut, and the feel of it against her shoulder blades is distracting.  
  
They aren’t too far off, less than a mile away, and walking loudly enough that it’s a surprise that they aren’t attracting every predator in this woods.  
  
There are two boys—young by the smell of them—but there’s something... off about the one with the shorter hair. His hair is buzzed close to his scalp, and as she watches, he cracks a joke about the killer moving the body, his hands on his hips, and something twists in her gut. He feels like home, like the visceral _thoughtsmelltaste_ of winter nights with her pack, curled up into a big ball in the family room with the window open.  
  
For a moment, his smell drowns out the other boys, and Derek closes her eyes, half-drunk with the feel of it. Then the moment passes and she can smell the other boy, with his mop of dark hair and the scent of alpha that lingers over him, and beneath that, what is undeniably his body undergoing some very serious changes that’s nowhere as simple as puberty.  
  
The second boy is muttering something about an inhaler when she steps into the clearing, just watching, waiting for them to take notice.  
  
It’s the first boy who sees her first, his eyes making a quick passover of the forest—over her—before he flinches, tapping his friend on the back. The way they both immediately slouch and look to the ground nearly makes her smile, guilty looks written plain across their faces, transparent enough for a human to see.  
  
She forces the unbidden smile down, schooling her face into a scowl as she strides forward, leaves crunching beneath her bare feet. When she’s not five feet from them, her throat closes up, and she stops. The smells are too much for her, the boy with the alpha’s stench lingering over him has her teeth itching, longing to rip out his throat. And the other boy is still off-putting, like a black hole, she wants to get closer to him, rub up against his side and find out why he smells like home.  
  
She plants her feet firmly in the grass, glaring at both of them until they both flush and drop their heads once more. “What are you doing here?” she demands, voice catching on the edge of a growl. “This is private property.”  
  
The strange one rubs the back of his head, coughing once before saying, “Sorry, man—uh, lady, we didn’t know.”  
  
“Yeah, we were just lookin’ for something, but...”  the other one trails off, his pupils shrinking as he looks at her, so she raises a brow, inviting him to finish his sentence. “Uh... forget it,” he finishes, shrugging his shoulders.  
  
She sighs, reaching into her pocket so she can toss him the inhaler.  
  
She wants to add something about staying away—away from her house and the ghosts that lurk within its ruined halls—away from her dead sister and the only thing that she has left of her family, but in the end, she bites her tongue and walks away.  
  
As she’s leaving she hears the human boy jerk his friend around, hissing, “Dude, that was Derek Hale. You remember, right? She’s only a few years older than us, her family burned to death in a fire like ten years ago.”  
  
Her throat closes up, choking her with the surge of anger that rises, grief following behind it like a tidal wave.  
  
“Huh, wonder why she’s back in town?”  
  
She’s out of sight by now, so she breaks into a run.  
  
.  
  
Her woods smell like alpha, like sickness and rot. It’s everywhere, and she can’t get the smell out of her nostrils.  
  
She gets sick in the bathtub in the hallway upstairs, and has to fill a bucket in a nearby stream to wash it out.  
  
Her sugar pine reeks, the full moon is in mere hours and there’s a new werewolf boy who might tear his friends in half.  
  
.  
  
Stiles Stilinski and Scott McCall. The first is the son of the new sheriff—he owns a jeep and has a 3.8 grade average. The second is the son of a nurse who, while not dumb, is certainly lacking the IQ points his friend has.  
  
She isn’t proud of the stalking, but it’s necessary, because Scott McCall is an idiot and doesn’t listen to his friend.  
  
The party is horrible and loud, the smell of cheap liquor burning her nose as she fends off too many unwanted hands. She’s reminded again rather sharply of why she never wanted this kind of life as a teenager, why she preferred reading books in front of the fire or racing Laura in the lake.  
  
The world grinds to a halt when she manages to lay eyes on Scott, hand in hand with a girl who smells too much like Kate to be a coincidence. Allison, Stiles had called her, but the last name had never come up. A shudder goes up her spine and she melts back into the shadows, watching from the general safety of the rooftop.  
  
.  
  
Scott leaves the party, disoriented and stumbling, leaving Allison staring after him, confused.  
  
Derek calls to her, gritting her teeth against the smell as she gets closer to the other girl. Her perfume smells like strawberries, but beneath that, the girl smells like Kate. “I’m a friend of Scott’s,” she grins, hands spouting claws inside of her pockets. “My name is Derek.”  
  
.  
  
She gives the girl a ride home, ignoring her awkward attempts at a conversation. She’s doing this because she’s not going to make the same mistake as her family—if the Argents have moved into town, she wants to know where their base is, and this is the best way.  
  
“Thank you for the ride,” Allison says sweetly, dimpling adorably. Derek smiles back. She can’t tell if it’s an act or not, but this girl acts nothing like Kate did, even when she was at her sweetest.  
  
The girl’s left her jacket in the passenger seat. Derek’s smile widens. “No problem.”  
  
.  
  
Grappling with half naked werewolf teenagers is far from her idea of a good time. What’s worse is getting ambushed by hunters before she can even try to educate the boy on what he’s becoming. Then comes saving the boy from said hunters, being accused of being a murderer, and by the time she can get a word in edgewise, she’s a bit cranky. She sneers at him, mocking him, “It’s not that bad, is it, Scott?” she hisses. She thinks of Laura—of pack—of her family when she growls, “the bite is a gift.”  
  
After she’s left him alone, she laughs at herself, a jagged, broken sound that cuts at her throat like razor wire. _Brother and sister, indeed._  
  
She can’t keep her family alive to save her life. It was as good as giving the boy a death sentence.  
  
.  
  
The moons had been tough to work through without a pelt, but they’re more difficult now that Laura’s gone as well. She has practice, so it isn’t until she gets home that she breaks down, shifting into that inbetween form, same as Scott’s—same as a turned wolf—and curling up into the corner.  
  
 _“What are you doing to yourself, Derek?”_ her sister’s voice coos. Laura smiles at her, wolf face half rotted, more so than her real corpse would be.  
  
“I don’t know,” she breathes into the dark, closing her eyes.  
  
Fingers stroke through her hair, but when she opens her eyes again, she’s alone.  
  
.  
  
She comes to grips with the fact that she’s incredibly fucked up when she assaults a teenage boy in his own home, pinning him to the wall and hissing threats into his ear—threats about whether he played in a lacrosse game of all things. In her defence, he’d nearly eaten his friend, but it’s still not her best moment.  
  
.  
  
More accusations, more threats, and she doesn’t know what she’s doing anymore, because the next thing she knows, her sister’s been dug up and she’s in the back of a squad car with Stiles in her face, still smelling just as enticingly of home, his heart knocking a nervous symphony against his ribs as he tells her, “Just so you know, I’m not afraid of you.”  
  
She wants to laugh in his face about as much as she wants to move closer, so she compromises, scowling at him until he admits, “Okay, maybe I am.”  
  
Then—then he asks her if her sister was a different kind of wolf—if that’s why she looked like a true wolf in the grave, and a growl works it’s way up her throat. She’s not going to explain this. Not to this human.  
  
She tells him to keep Scott off the field, because maybe the foolish boy will listen to his friend if he’s too stupid to heed Derek’s advice. Stiles eyes go wide, pupils dilating, and she can’t help but lean closer—breathing in his fear and his lust and smirking at him through the grate. “Trust me,” she breathes, licking her lips, and then he’s being dragged from the front seat, leaving her to settle back, handcuffs digging into her wrists.  
  
.  
  
She gets released once they examine the body. An animal attack, they tell her—and once they ID her, we’re sorry about your loss.  
  
“I found her,” she tells them. “I found her in the woods the day I came back and I just, I needed to bury her.”  
  
They nod, as if it’s perfectly normal to cart half of your dead sister back to your burnt-out husk of a family home to bury her in the front yard.  
  
She goes home.  
  
.  
  
She’s not an alpha. Her eyes glow blue, not red, but when Scott throws her through a wall, it feels fantastic to let loose—slowly rolling her neck to make the change go easier. She’s missed the feel of being able to do something with herself, even if it’s as simple as throwing a teenager around a room to make the ache of loneliness and self-loathing go away. She kicks him in the ribs, and when he comes at her again, she lets her claws drag against his chest, a snarl in the back of his throat even as he crawls away from her, panting.  
  
The anger is slow to drain from her, but when it does, she feels guilty. He’s just a stupid kid, and he’s the best shot she has at finding who killed Laura.  
  
“I didn’t kill her,” she breathes. “Neither of us did.”  
  
“This is all your fault!” he howls, and isn’t that the truth. It’s always Derek Hale’s fault. “You ruined my life!”  
  
She laughs at him, bitterly enough that he stops, eyes confused.  
  
“I’m not the one that bit you,” she admits, because it’s about time that she gave him a bit of a lesson in werewolf hierarchy.  
  
.  
  
Getting shot was never part of the plan. Relying on flighty werewolf boys and their spazzy friends was so far from the plan that it wasn’t even funny.  
  
Showing up at their school, pale and dripping blood, only to nearly rip a teenager in half—also not part of the plan, even if the guy is a fucking asshole.  
  
But all of that brings her up to where she is now, bleeding all over the interior of Stiles jeep, barely hanging onto consciousness, waiting for Scott McCall to get a wolfsbane bullet from Derek’s psychotic ex.  
  
The urge to head over to the Argent’s, damn the pain, and rip Kate in half is so strong that her eyes flicker blue every few moments—something that apparently makes Stiles extremely nervous.  
  
“Considering my past luck with werewolves making crazy eyes with me in this car, I’m thinking that I should probably just dump you out right now,” he mutters, and she laughs through gritted teeth.  
  
The car is awash with scents: fear, panic, annoyance, and arousal. It’s a cocktail that would have her on edge even if she wasn’t dying, so she can’t entirely fault herself when she slumps a bit onto his shoulder, biting out, “You wouldn’t.” She closes her eyes and breathes him in.  
  
“Okay, okay, hot werewolf chick is smelling me, we have a code five emergency here, oh my god, are you nuzzling me? Where the hell is Scott?”  
  
She lolls back against the window, pressing her cheek against the glass and god, it’s too hot for leather jackets—  
  
“Are you _stripping_ now?” Stiles shrieks, and the car swerves. Her head spins and she growls at him, teeth bared.  
  
“No, now get your eyes back on the damn road.”  
  
.  
  
“Start the car,” she growls, watching his eyes widen. “Or I’m going to rip your throat out. With my teeth.”  
  
.  
  
Everything smells like dog and metal and blood, and her vision’s starting to go blurry. She sways against Stiles, breathing deep when he catches her around the waist. “You’re really not lookin’ so good,” he breathes nervously and she frowns at him.  
  
With a groan, she starts to struggle out of her shirt, tossing it to the floor and ignoring his high-pitched accusation of, “Oh my god, what the hell, you are stripping.”  
  
She shoots him an irritable look. The sports bra she’s wearing is perfectly concealing—she’s grown a bit since she was the flattest girl in class, but not by much. With a snort, she starts rifling through cabinets. Her head’s still hazy, and Stiles takes to following her around the room, catching her every once in a while when she nearly tumbles backwards.  
  
“What are you looking for?”  
  
“Last resort,” she huffs, yanking open a door. His hand is still on her hip, steadying her there, and when she looks at him, he pulls back as if burned.  
  
“Which is?”  
  
She grins fiercely when she finds what she’s looking for, wavering on her feet as she brandishes the bone-saw. “You’re gonna cut off my arm.”  
  
.  
  
It doesn’t go very well. She still almost dies, and it’s only Stiles punching her in the face that brings her out of it enough to make it work.  
  
It hurts, more than she thought was possible.  
  
But she lives, arm intact and everything. When she leaves, Stiles gives her a pat on the back and a brief, “Glad you didn’t die!” that makes her growl at him until he gets his hands off of her.  
  
.  
  
Over the next few days she gets some claws through her back, nearly bleeds out, has to heal some pretty severe internal bleeding and some crushed bones, and is declared a wanted felon because Scott is a grade A idiot.  
  
So she goes to the person that her wolf feels safest with—to the place where the police would least expect her.  
  
.  
  
From the moment she crawls into Stiles’ room, she can tell something’s strange. It’s like a breath of fresh air—that scent of his, but stronger. His room smells like boy—like unwashed socks and sweat and a lingering of come, stronger near the bed, that makes her wrinkle her nose. It isn’t unexpected, Scott’s room had smelled the same, but beneath all that there’s a memory of fur and the way the leaves crunched beneath her paws. It makes her double over, vision blurring, and she takes huge gulping breaths of the air, like she’s starved for it.  
  
She doesn’t understand it—still doesn’t, after all these weeks of knowing the boy.  
  
She’d been young when her family died, and they hadn’t told her anything about what happens when your wolf meets someone that it trusts completely—someone who makes her want to drop all her masks and just bask in their presence. It’s illogical, going deeper than even how Derek had felt with Kate, and it makes her angry and soft all at once.  
  
It’s still early, and Stiles isn’t due back for another few hours and she hasn’t slept in days.  
  
So she crawls into his bed, burying herself in sheets that smell like sex and teenage boy, and sleeps.  
  
.  
  
She wakes to the sound of the front door opening, her brain going from fuzzy with sleep to sharply alert in seconds, quickly enough for her to lunge for the corner behind the door before Stiles walks in. She debates with herself for a moment, whether she wants to rethink this course of action now that her brain isn’t quite so sleep-deprived or if she still feels like begging for help, tail between her legs.  
  
The decision is made for her when Stiles spins around in his chair to answer his father’s call and catches sight of her, his heart stuttering in his chest before she glares at him and gestures for the door.  
  
She listens as he babbles at his father, part of her wryly amused, the other part rolling her eyes. The boy talks too much when he’s nervous.  
  
When he comes back into the room he radiates irritation and it rankles her enough that she snarls, pinning him to his door, one hand fisted in the collar of his jacket. She’s close enough to him that she can count the freckles in his eyes—smell that he had curly fries recently. Her nostrils flare and his heart rate spikes—faster and faster. She bares her teeth at him and jabs her finger in his face and hisses— “If you say one word...”  
  
He frowns at her, his heart beat steadying back out so fast that it leaves her off kilter. “What, like ‘hey Dad, Derek Hale’s in my room, bring your gun?’”  
  
She scowls at him and relaxes her hold on him and he smirks at her in a way that makes her insides twist with interest. “Yeah, that’s right, my house, my rules, lady.” There’s a cocky little hitch to his breathing, so she smiles sweetly and nods, straightening the places where the fabric of his jacket is still pinched from her grip on it.  
  
He’s still smirking when he straightens her jacket out in turn and when he goes to walk past her, she can’t help the little move of intent that she makes towards him, snorting with laughter when his heart skips a beat.  
  
.  
  
“That’s uh, my cousin. Mildred.”  
  
She gives him a flat look that only abates when the other boy, Danny, squints at her shirt and breathes, “Is that blood?”  
  
“She uh, gets nosebleeds a lot. Hey Mildred, how ‘bout you borrow one of my shirts, huh?”  
  
She glares at him, teeth gritted, and slams the dictionary down. Fine, if he wants to play this game, she’ll play it. When she whips her shirt over her head, there are two sharp intakes of breath from behind her. She smirks meanly as she digs through Stiles clothing, fighting the urge to cross her arms over her bare breasts. He’d wanted to play the game. It isn’t her fault that she’s not wearing a bra—the sports bra she’d been wearing the other night had been damaged beyond repair, and being a fugitive, she hasn’t quite had the time to go buy another one.  
  
The first shirt that she jerks on is too small in the chest, constricting enough that her breasts feel sore, so she jerks it off angrily, turning to face them and hissing, “Stiles, none of these fit.”  
  
For a moment, she has his gaze affixed to her chest before his cheeks color and—  
  
“Oh my god, Stiles, whatever, I’ve got this. Go get your cousin a change of clothes, please.”  
  
His cheeks go even redder, and she smiles at him, teeth bared, and leaves the shirt off as she follows him down the hall. “I’ve uh, got some looser sleep shirts in the laundry room, just yeah, c’mon.”  
  
.  
  
The laundry room is small, so she has to crowd in right next to him, delighting in the way he flinches away from her bare skin. “Why Stiles,” she breathes in his ear, teasing. “It’s almost like you’ve never seen a pair of tits before.”  
  
He gulps, bending down to extricate something from the dryer. “Yeah, well, I didn’t know that you were going to whip them out. Ever heard of _bras_ , wild woman?”  
  
She laughs at him when he stands back up, pressing a warm shirt into her hands that she immediately sets aside in favor of backing him up against a wall, her chest pressed against his. The zipper of his jacket immediately manages to dig into her nipple, but the rest of the fabric is warm with his body heat, and it feels so good that it takes a second for her to remember that she’s just teasing the boy, not actually set out to get his pants around his ankles.  
  
She blinks, taking a deep breath as he lets out a little squawk that’s half shock, half moan. She can feel his heartbeat right next to hers, feel the twitch of him against her thigh and all of a sudden she aches for it—for him—imagines herself yanking his pants to his feet and stroking him to hardness—imagines him sliding into her, slick and smooth, filling her up so good—  
  
It’s the scent of her own arousal that snaps her out of it, and she pulls away from him, smirking one last time before she pulls the new shirt over her head. It’s soft and baggy, comfortable, and it smells of laundry detergent and fabric softener.  
  
She squints down at the Captain America decal on the front and figures that smacking him is the easiest course of action.  
  
Neither of them say a word to each other as they tromp back up the stairs to where Danny has managed to successfully locate the origin of the text.  
  
.  
  
 _“Stiles, get out of there right now, it’s him, he’s the alpha—_ ”  
  
Her own fear is acrid, panic making her reach for the handle and—  
  
.  
  
Peter happens.  
  
Peter happens and he nearly kills Stiles, and she was running on instinct when she left the safety of the jeep to go confront Peter—her head a mess of _protect the boy, protect the boy, protect the bo_ y—  
  
It hurts. Her nose is bleeding and some of her ribs have snapped, but more than that her chest is messed up, heartstrings being cut one by one, and her throat choked with emotion because _how dare he, he killed Laura, stole her eyes, why, and pack, pack, pack—_  
  
“After all, we’re family,” he breathes, and something inside of her breaks—  
  
.  
  
Laura had been the one to pull Peter’s pelt from the wreckage of the house, so Derek had known what it looked like. She’d been able to smell the singed fur, see how mangled it had become, half of it burnt away, the other half reeking of ash.  
  
It’s not the same as watching Peter drape it over his shoulders—not the same as watching him turn into some hulking monstrosity—half wolf half something else.  
  
Her heart breaks a little bit, and the look she sends Peter is the same one that he returns when she changes alongside of him, no pelt to breathe the wolf back into her.  
  
.  
  
She lets herself get stupid, so starved for family that she lets Peter yank her around by the strings and then—and then Kate has her.  
  
“Oh sweetie, we’re going to have so much fun,” Kate purrs. She pushes a button.  
  
She’s used to this. Kate likes seeing her in pain.  
  
.  
  
“You were so sweet, Derek. You loved me so much, remember this?” Kate asks her, wicked smirk curling across her lips as she bends to hike up Derek’s shirt—Stiles shirt—and licks a wet line down her stomach. His smell grounds her for a moment, and she breathes it in—home and pack and teenage boy—but the moment passes when Kate starts to toy with the button of Derek’s jeans. She snarls, struggling against the chains, and Kate just laughs.  
  
“But the kicker, sweetheart, was that pretty little pelt of yours. The fur was so soft— _so flammable_ —holding a lighter over it made it so very easy to get your family into that basement. Oh sweetie, how they screamed, all that burning flesh and fur, it was _intoxicating_.”  
  
She struggles so much that she breaks one of the chains and Kate gives her a flat glare. “Naughty puppy,” she chides, before flipping the electricity back on.  
  
She smells burning flesh, hears her skin crack and sizzle, and it hurts—  
  
.  
  
“Did you ever tell your sister the truth?” Kate asks.  
  
Derek grits her teeth, remembering the look on Laura’s face—that blank one first, fingers stroking through her hair, and then later, the frustration when she had hissed, “Derek, it wasn’t your fault.”  
  
Derek closes her eyes. Kate doesn’t need to know that. Kate doesn’t need to know anything about Laura. Let her think what she wants.  
  
“It’s not all your fault. You got tricked by a pretty face. It happens!”  
  
.  
  
Scott gets her out. Scott tells her the truth about Peter—the truth about _Laura_.  
  
She breathes him in, lets the scent of Stiles that’s lingering on both of their skin calm her.  
  
.  
  
Kate dies while Derek’s clawing at the forest floor, trying to get inside the ruin of her house. Her cheek is pressed against the upturned soil where Laura was once buried when she smells the life go out of her—her blood dashed across the ruined floorboards like a cleansing ritual—like Peter’s trying to appease their ghosts with Argent blood.  
  
She presses her brow to the ground and feels like crying with relief—with anger.  
  
Derek stays there until she hears Allison cry out, Scott’s rumbling growl and Peter’s broken howl.  
  
She pushes herself to the feet.  
  
.  
  
Stiles saves the day, Stiles and that douchebag Jackson—they set Peter on fire, and the panic that rips at her chest at the sight of it has her dry-heaving into dead leaves. The grief she feels for her uncle is a sharp biting pain beneath her ribs as his pelt falls from him in ashes, as the fire catches at all too human skin, because no one should have to go through that again. Not after what he did—not after the fire that ripped apart his family and his mind.  
  
Derek kills him, because packs take care of their own. She puts him down even as Scott shouts at her—he needs a cure—but she can’t let him have this. It might not work and she’ll be damned if she lets someone else have what belongs to her family.  
  
She watches the red drain from Peter’s eyes and feels—  
  
She feels everything and she was never supposed to be the alpha, but the power burns through her, eyes bleeding red and finally—  
  
.  
  
She lets go—  
  
—and she runs.  
  
.  
  
Stiles is sitting on his bed when she wriggles her way in through his window, stroking something that’s in his lap, a lump of fabric that—  
  
Her breath catching in her throat is what alerts him to her presence and he whirls, his fear spiking, and she has to catch herself against the windowsill to avoid falling backwards. Her vision’s tunneling, and she feels dizzy, so very dizzy, and the smell of him is stronger now, but it isn’t him—the smell is coming from what’s sitting in his lap, something that makes her think of family and home and sugar-pine trees and her mother’s open, laughing mouth as her father whirls her around the living room.  
  
“Where—” she starts, but her voice is barely above a rasped, heady whisper, so she clears her throat. “Where did you get that?” she whisper, inching closer to him.  
  
He looks at his lap, then back to her, eyes confused. “Uh, you’re going all red eyes on me, Derek, and I gotta say, not liking the look too much.”  
  
She growls. “Where did you get it?!” she barks, leaning closer and—  
  
“I found it!” he yelps as she curls a hand into the collar of his shirt, making to jerk him off the bed. “When I was a kid! I found it in the woods and it was really cool so I took it home! Cleaned it up, used one of my mom’s brushes to get the worst of the tangles out, I’m sorry, I don’t know what I did, but if this is some weird werewolf hangup, I’m sorry!”  
  
She runs a hand over it and shivers. It’s warm from the heat of his body, like he’s been napping with it. She can imagine it now, him throwing it over the back of his computer chair, so he can wrap around his shoulders whenever he gets cold—maybe sleeping with it during the winter, pulled tight around him, cocooning him in warmth.  
  
She lets him go, dropping to her knees in front of him. She rubs her cheek against it, giving a soft, shaky sigh. “Why have I never seen it here?” she asks quietly.  
  
He laughs nervously, one of his legs starting to jitter. She frowns and presses her hand down on his knee, stilling it. “I uh,” he starts. He clears his throat. “When Scott got turned, I hid it beneath my floorboards. I wasn’t sure if it would make him all weird, seeing a wolf pelt, and I couldn’t get rid of it and uh, yeah.”  
  
She sighs and can feel him shudder at the feel of her breath on his thigh. Carefully, he reaches out, cupping her jaw so he can tilt it up, making her meet his eyes. “Uh, Derek? What’s going on here?” he asks, throat clicking when he swallows nervously. “Not that uh, it’s not great having a chick between my legs, but you’re eyes are still all glow-y and you’re acting like my Great Aunt May’s cat Charlie when he gets a hold of the catnip and uh, teeth,” he finishes, and she laughs gently, happily rubbing her face against his thigh. His dick twitches a little against her cheek, and that makes her laugh too, ignoring his affronted “hey!” as she presses a smile into warm fur.  
  
“It’s my pelt,” she breathes.  
  
“Your what?”  
  
She laughs a little—half breathless, half deliriously happy—and repeats, “It’s my pelt. I... I thought I’d lost it.”  
  
His leg starts jittering again, but stills quickly enough when she squeezes his knee again. “So... is it like a fashion statement?”  
  
She plucks it from his leg, says, “I’ll show you,” but... she can’t quite bring herself to put it on. It feels like it’s too good to be true, like she doesn’t deserve to have her pelt when the rest of her family is dead.  
  
‘ _It wasn’t your fault, Derek,_ ’ Laura’s voice whispers.  
  
She offers Stiles a tentative smile and hands it back to him, climbing to her feet and using one hand to gather her hair back into a knot at the base of her skull, up and off of her shoulders. She’s still wearing Stiles’ Captain America shirt, and it gapes at the neck, enough that she knows he can see black ink against the knobs of her spine. She looks at him over her shoulder, gesturing. “Here, just, you do it. Just drape it over my shoulders, like a shawl.”  
  
He wipes his hands against his comforter before he gets to his feet, and his hands are shaking when they brush against her neck. “Like this?” he asks shakily, breath coming in puffs against the side of her neck. His hands are still holding it an inch or so off her skin, but the ends of it brush against the backs of her thighs and shoulder blades, each touch a cry of welcome back.  
  
Not trusting her voice, she nods.  
  
Stiles swallows once more, and then—  
  
He tucks it around her shoulders, the edges brushing against her neck, and she can feel herself start to change, hear his yelp as he scrambles backwards to avoid her lengthening body—the crunching bones that she can’t quite feel, fluid as it should be rather than the painful process that the turned wolves have to go through.  
  
She looks at him when it’s over, and his eyes are wide and surprised, hunched on the corner of his bed farthest away from her. It amuses her, so she deftly jumps onto the bed with him, curling up at his shaking side. One of his hands is clenched around his left knee, knuckles white. She licks it and he lets out a disbelieving little laugh, lifting that same hand and placing it between her ears.  
  
She feels like laughing forever, like the hole in her chest has healed over.  
  
She feels free.  
  
.  
  
“You asked me once, why Laura looked like a real wolf in the grave,” she says, later, once she’s human again, still curled up in Stiles bed. Her head’s resting on his knee, his fingers in her hair—stroking through it like he’d stroked her fur. It’s a little bit weird and she knows that he’s nervous, but his heartbeat is calm, his hands steady.  
  
“Now you know why.”  
  
His hand pauses in her hair, so she turns towards him. “Come run with me?” she asks.  
  
.  
  
They run.

 

 


End file.
